As I stumbled out of the elevator and tiredly made my way to the small group of cubicles that time forgot in the depths of the basement carrying my already-half-eaten Dunkin Donuts dozen and large coffee, I sighed.  I had spent the previous evening in the office troubleshooting the Vice President’s son’s laptop; it was not connecting to the internet.  I swear he tricked me: when the Vice President asks you to perform a task for him, you do not say no, even if it technically is not part of the scope of the job description.  So naturally, I said yes.  Naturally, just before realizing it was already past time for me to go home.  I felt like I just left this place!

I got to my desk and groaned at the sea of yellow paper that covered it.  I may have just left, but that was still enough time for everyone in the corporation—and their mothers, apparently, looking at one of the tickets—to come and drop tech support requests on my desk.  I began my morning sorting into my three piles: quick stuff to get out of the way, interesting questions I would like to look into, and all the other junk I do not want to handle until the end of the day.  Or, there would have been three piles, if there was anything quick or interesting.  Looks like today, it was all complicated.

Scarfing down another donut, I picked up the stack of tickets and ventured forth.  It was rather mundane work, mainly running back and forth to the tech room to supply new replacement keyboards and mice to the soda-spillers of the society, which just made the task more difficult.  Mr. Watson, who deletes everything he thinks he does not ever need, needed me to recover some files out of the backup.  Almost an hour was spent navigating the VMware Backup to locate what he needed.

I stopped by the Vice President’s office, waving the ticket he had left on my desk after I went home for the day.  It turned out, that his other boy had a problem with an iPod and wanted me to look at that too.  I nodded enthusiastically on the outside, and my heart sank inside.  At least I learned a vital lesson: hit the VIPs much earlier in the day, because you just cannot say no!